You, being an upstanding person and a credit to society, probably haven’t sought out the notorious photograph of a man’s crotch that appeared on Twitter under Rep. Anthony Weiner’s name last Friday. Alas, I have seen it. So, after pausing a moment to gag a little from the memory, I will now explain to you that the angle of the cellphone photograph dictates it must have been taken by the person whose crotch it depicts.
This leaves us with two possibilities.
One is that the crotch in question is not Anthony Weiner’s crotch, but the evil crotch of an impostor intent on destroying Weiner’s career — and one so skilled that he could hack into both Weiner’s Twitter feed and a related system for uploading photographs called YFrog.
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The hacker-with-an-impostor-crotch claim is the core of Weiner’s defense against the devastating evidence that a 46-year-old married congressman from Brooklyn had sent a lewd sexual message through a social-media site to a student at Whatcom Community College in Washington state.
The other possibility is that Weiner is a very, very bad liar.
I have to go with Possibility No. 2. Indeed, I think everybody but Weiner himself is now going with possibility No. 2 — and even he’s not so sure.
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Anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the matter surely now understands that Weiner intended the photograph in question solely for the eyes of the undergrad — but instead of sending it as a “direct message,” he mistakenly posted it publicly for the entire “Twitterverse” to see.
That makes him not only a bad liar, but an incompetent liar.
So how, you may ask, can I say without question that Weiner is a liar?
Actually, the question is, after yesterday’s exchange with MNSBC’s Luke Russert, how can’t I?
“That’s not a picture of you?” Russert asked him.
“I can’t say with certitude,” Weiner replied.
It’s simple logic. If he can’t say with certitude that it isn’t his crotch, he is saying, in effect, that it is undeniably his crotch.
Actually, the only way it could be his crotch without him having taken the picture and then posted it is for the hacker to have leaned over Weiner’s shoulder in a location where Weiner was already stripped down to his underpants, placed his own head next to the congressman’s without Weiner knowing it, snapped the picture, and then scurried away.
That is the only conceivable other angle from which that specific photo of Anthony Weiner’s crotch could have been taken.
The last time Russert encountered Weiner, it was Jan. 19, just before the State of the Union Address. Russert reported on Twitter that Weiner was advising people to play “that now-popular drinking game that you take a shot whenever GOP say things that aren’t true.”
If that drinking game had been going on over the past five days in relation to Anthony Weiner, the entire country would have cirrhosis of the liver.
Now Weiner’s fate rests with his constituents. They will have to decide, come November 2012, whether they want a man representing them in Washington who is not only a liar and a married man engaging in sophomoric “sexting,” but a national laughingstock as well.
That is, if he makes it to the November 2012 ballot at all.
johnpodhoretz@gmail.com